When things are going badly for a leader it is easy to see everything he or she does through the twin prisms of fear and failure. So it will probably prove for Theresa May when she leaves today for China on a trade mission with executives from 40 or so industry associations, quangos and exporters big and small. She will leave behind a cabinet in open turmoil over her leadership. She will miss prime minister’s questions in a week when her remaining supporters might wish she could face down the rebels on her own side and fight for her job. But she cannot, for good reason.
The China trip has of course been months in the planning and it supports precisely the agenda that should be uppermost in Mrs May’s mind. She is attending to the needs of business. The real concern for her party should be that she has not been attending to them more assiduously throughout the Brexit process.
When the leader of the opposition can think of nothing capitalism has got right, as Jeremy Corbyn admitted on Sunday, it should be open season on Labour for Conservatives as natural defenders of free markets and trade. At the same time, as she steers Britain out of the EU, a Conservative prime minister should be consulting at every opportunity the chief executives who must make the best of whatever post-Brexit deal with Europe is eventually reached. Instead, Mrs May spared them barely 15 minutes at a lunch they hosted for Philip Hammond, the chancellor, in Davos. Later she pointedly corrected his vision of only “modest” divergence for Britain’s economy from Europe’s after withdrawal.
This would have been justified had the prime minister set out her own vision of the so-called end state, but she has not. Clarity on what life after the fast-approaching transition might look like is what business now craves. Beijing would be grateful for it, too.
Mrs May’s hosts in China and those travelling with her all want broadly the same thing from Brexit: the closest possible relationship with Europe that also delivers political stability. In the jargon, that is closer to Mr Hammond’s “high alignment” than to the “buccaneering” Brexit that Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, has promised to describe in his next speech on the subject.
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Finessing the difference between these two has proved impossible. Mrs May has done her best, politely stonewalling when asked what she wants from Brexit even when the person asking is the German chancellor, but she cannot go on doing this much longer. The time for hard choices is upon her. If she fails to make them, it is increasingly likely that the party will replace her before the year is out. If she makes the wrong ones, it would be a victory for bad politics over sound economics, and a hollow one at that.
She arrives in Beijing with diplomatic ground to make up. Where David Cameron embraced China’s new status as an essential business partner, she has questioned it. Where he arrived with six ministerial colleagues, she is bringing one. In these difficult circumstances she has indicated in advance that she will be talking about plastic waste. Before Davos it was artificial intelligence. Both are important subjects but both have been chosen to sidestep Brexit, on which she cannot speak with authority because her cabinet cannot agree a Brexit strategy, and she cannot dictate one.
Deals will be signed in Beijing. Communiqués hailing a golden era in Sino-British relations will be issued. The visit will lack the impact of recent foreign missions by President Macron and President Trump, but it will not have been in vain as long as it forces Mrs May to listen carefully to her travelling companions. They will have 20 hours together in the air; plenty of time to mingle. Mrs May must be left in no doubt that Britain can thrive after Brexit only if business can.